Towards the Perfect Coin Flip: The NIST Randomness Beacon
Since early evening on September 5th, 2013 the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been publishing a 512-bit, full-entropy random number every minute of every day. What’s more, each number is cryptographically signed so that you can easily verify that it was generated by the NIST. A date stamp is included in the process, so that you can tell when the random values were created. And finally, all of the values are linked to the previous value in a chain so that you can detect if any of the past numbers in the series have been altered …read more
Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain
I was born in 1973 in Czechoslovakia. It was a small country in the middle of Europe, unfortunately on the dark side of the Iron Curtain. We had never been a part of Soviet Union (as many think), but we were so-called “Soviet Satellite”, side by side with Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.
My hobbies were electronics and – in the middle of 80s – computers. The history of computers behind the Iron Curtain is very interesting, with a lot of unusual moments. For example – communists at first called cybernetics as “bourgeois’ pseudoscience” (as well as sociology or semiotics), …read more
Downloading Data Through The Display
HIPAA – the US standard for electronic health care documentation – spends a lot of verbiage and bureaucratese on the security of electronic records, making a clear distinction between the use of records by health care worker and the disclosure of records by health care workers. Likewise, the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 makes the same distinction; records that should never be disclosed or transmitted should be used on systems that are disconnected from networks.
This distinction between use and disclosure or transmission is of course a farce; if you can display something on a screen, it can …read more
Reverse Engineering Capcom’s Crypto CPU
There are a few old Capcom arcade titles – Pang, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, and Block Block – that are unlike anything else ever seen in the world of coin-ops. They’re old, yes, but what makes these titles exceptional is the CPU they run on. The brains in the hardware of these games is a Kabuki, a Z80 CPU that had a few extra security features. why would Capcom produce such a thing? To combat bootleggers that would copy and reproduce arcade games without royalties going to the original publisher. It’s an interesting part of arcade history, but also a problem …read more
Fail of the Week: Teddy Top and Fourteen Fails
Last summer, [Quinn] made the trip out to KansasFest, the annual Apple II convention in Kansas City, MO. There, she picked up the most modern Apple II system that wasn’t an architecturally weird IIGS: she lugged home an Apple IIc+, a weird little machine that looks like an old-school laptop without a screen.
Not content with letting an old computer just sit on a shelf looking pretty, [Quinn] is working on a project called the Teddy Top. ‘Teddy’ was one of the code names for the Apple IIc, and although add-ons to turn this book-sized computer into something like a …read more
